This is a call

A sweeping history of the history of punk rock to alt rock as traced by the whirlwind path of Dave Grohl, this book certainly ventures out of the strict boundaries of a Dave Grohl biography, but I loved it wholeheartedly. To tell the story of a man who has been making music since age 12, released his first demo at 15, rose to prominence drumming in Nirvana, and then went on to lead his own phenomenally successful band, and jumps in on side projects with some of the biggest names in rock for the hell of it, you've got to cast a wide net.

It helps that I skimmed reviews here first, and was therefore prepared for a heaping side of music history with my main serving of Dave Grohl anecdotes, but I rarely found myself disinterested in any of the "auxillary" notes. He spends plenty of time savoring the various albums and acts that Dave intersected with, and his day job as a music writer is fully apparent, but Brannigan does a good job of tying things back together before too long, and especially for someone like me who knows next to nothing about the environment that forged Grohl's musical sensibilities, they help tell the tale very well.

I was a glad to find that the reviewers that complaints about Brannigan's dwelling on Nirvana at the expense of the Foo Fighters were a bit overblown, in my opinion. Numbers-wise, the book is pretty evenly chunked into three sections: pre-Nirvana, Nirvana, Foo Fighters. So by pages-per-year, Nirvana does get about twice the coverage of Foo Fighters, but I didn't feel like I missed anything. Nirvana and his pre-Nirvana years are pretty important chapters in Grohl's story, and those chapters are closed. Foo Fighters is a story that's still being told, and frankly, it's not as dense in significance and interesting stuff as the first couple phases. We'll get the Foo Fighters bio in a decade or two, but at this point, I think the balance was very well handled.

So anyway, I came away from this book loving Dave Grohl even more than I did - it's a fantastic portrait of a fascinating man, and simultaneously same time a sweeping history of rock in all of its incarnations, with the two threads intertwining to tell each other's story. If you really don't like music criticism, or are going to get bored reading about things that aren't directly related to Grohl, you might want to skip it, but if you think you have space in your reading schedule for some punk rock history along the way, it will be well worth your while.